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C LIT 461 -- Seminar in Literary Genres and Forms Lecd
B 2:00-3:50 Th
1128 FLB
R Rushing Topic: Resisting Arrest - Section B meets with Italian 495 In this course, we will examine the relationship between two literary genres: detective fiction and travel
narrative. Although both genres are
characterized by an epistemic drive -- the desire to know another place, or to
understand the identity of the criminal -- they are also both curiously reliant on
the figure of arrest at the moment the criminal is apprehended or the
traveler stops moving, a moment when the knowledge acquired during the voyage or
investigation becomes comprehensible. More negatively, this is also the moment when
both genres close down the narrative and cognitive threats and desires they
depend on proliferating (was it the butler or the dentist who did it? will our
hero 'go native' or go home?). Similarly,
in his discussion of travel narratives, Georges Van Den Abeele understands the
space of the home as the transcendental point of reference that orients
the traveler, but also one that domesticates the (financial, sexual, epistemic)
threats and promises afforded by the journey.
'Home' may have an analogous function in detective fiction as well,
bringing the movement of interpretation and signification to a halt.
Can one resist the domestic bliss promised by this arrest? Texts read will range from the popular (Agatha
Christie, Alfred Hitchcock, Jules Verne, Collodi's Pinocchio) to the
literary (Calvino, Sophocles, Kafka), not to mention the theoretical (Lacan,
Derrida, Zizek, Freud, Cavarero). Readings:
Theoretical readings from Lacan, Derrida, Zizek,
Van Den Abeele, Bayard, Cavarero, Greenblatt, Rushdie, Freud, Miller, Cachey,
Pratt and others. |